When Magritte meets Beuys...

Typically, I forgot to mention one the installation I liked the most when visiting “Walking in my Mind” at the Hayward Gallery yesterday.

"The first cut is the deepest and the division of seven", 2009

Bo Christian Larsson's themes are mysterious and esoteric and he first stroke me as being the Magritte of walk-through mindscapes. All his works – drawings, installations, performances and objects – interrelate; environments and objects are created for a spontaneous performance and, after this action has taken place, continue to inhabit the space, like archaeological remains.
I would actually go even further by placing Larsson as a cross between Magritte and Beuys althought as far as I am aware Larsoon has yet to work with coyotes!

The Worldhaters Homesick Blues Original, 2009

“La Lunette d'Approche", René Magritte, 1963

"Information has to enter your mind and become part of you before you can process it and use it in a creative way, so naturally everything comes from inside. I would say that my work shows my creative process in its naked truth. I see no difference between the finished work and the process."

The Worldhater's Sculpture Garden

Almost all of Larsson's installations are the results of a performance or happening. The essential elements and structures in the installations are prepared and specified, and the performance is an act of spontaneous action within this controlled space. A recurring component is a black wig hiding Larsson's face, creating a sort of artificial blindness and darkness guiding the view to the inside, to the essential.

"The Worldhater's Sculpture Garden" during the performance.

For Larsson everything has its origin in the darkness, where the human spirit develops - and in this case, free from the apparent reality because of the reduced visual perception: "I think this [the wig] is the only costume you can wear at all, it makes so little and so much with your body at the same time.[...]. You put on the wig and you are a different person. This has always fascinated me. I have the wig in front of my eyes. I turn it around, so I can't see anything. This is a very important point in my performances, that I blind myself and have to take a look inside. I become a different person and disappear in this role."

"The Golden Cage A.K.A. Dieisland" during the performance...


...and after the performance, with Larsson's white shirt hanging in the middle and a speaker to narrate the story.

Walking in my mind

vampyresheep and I went to the see "Walking in my mind" at the Hayward Gallery this evening just on time before the closure this weekend. The blurb said that the exhibition is "an expedition into the mysterious mental processes of creativity" and we were certainly not disappointed!

"Walking in my mind" is a series of walk-through mindscape drawn from Freud's structural model of the psyche, id, ego and super-ego.

The ten artists in the show are creative about their own creating, each having made a psychic self-portrait in the form of a stroll-through installation.

"The Creation Myth" by Jason Rhoades

Jason Rhoades's sprawling, rambunctious installation in which a huge, red inflatable tube represents the alimentary system, leads to the engine room of the brain, a control centre flickering with computers and televisions. Rhoades uncovers the process of the mental handling of images, impressions and impulses asking himself why one thing is being stored in the brains and the other not as well as what role do moral principles play in this. Yet Rhoades's "Creation Myth" could represent any mind were it not for the hardcore porn scattered all around the room and scatological humour.
The art-historical roots of Jason Rhoades can be found in the work of Marcel Duchamp, the most obvious reference springing to my mind being his "Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors" but also in the Fluxus movement and in the radical statements of Minimal Art from the sixties.

"The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (The Large Glass), 1915-23.
Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels.

Charles Avery takes the walking bit of the show's title literally as one part of his installation is downstairs, another upstairs and a third one is out on a terrace.

Untitled, (Bejewelled Hare), by Charles Avery, 2009

Untitled (Eternity Chamber), by Charles Avery, 2007

Untitled (Distance at a Distance) by Charles Avery - 2009

Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn created a walk-through cranium, constructed from packing tape and cardboard, silted with used Coke cans and outsize philosophy texts. The slippery passageways are flyposted with Marxist tracts, there are shadowy silver figures - Plato's cave - and the caves of Lascaux are shown on shadowy monitors.

Cavemanman by Thomas Hirschhorn

In this exhibition it is not the ponderously thought-through works that stays with you, but the uncanny simplicity of three artists, all Japanese.
In Yoshimoto Nara's case, looking through the windows of his comic-filled Wendy house, My Drawing Room, is to feel a common mourning of childhood.

My Drawing Room by Yoshimoto Nara

My Drawing Room by Yoshimoto Nara

Yayoi Kusama now 80, has lived for years as a voluntary in-patient at a Tokyo mental hospital. Her famously polka-dotted soft sculptures are drawn from hallucinations she suffered as a child when she would see dots both inside and outside her head. In this show Kusama's room filled with spotty inflatables, co-opts you as a character in a fairy tale, or perhaps as a fifth Teletubby or as Tintin in "L'Étoile mystérieuse".

Yayoi Kusama, “Dots Obsession"

"Les Aventures de Tintin: L'Étoile mystérieuse"

Kusama's dots spread contagiously over every inch of an entire room before spilling out on the balcony and even on a few the trees on the South Bank.

It is the least known of the three Japanese artists who really impresses. Chiharu Shiota has filled a section of the Hayward's top floor with a tunnel of stretched black threads, imprisoning white spectral shapes.

After the Dream by Chiharu Shiota

After the Dream by Chiharu Shiota (detail)

I guess I can only strongly encourage you to visit the exhibition and will conclude this review by quoting Chiharu Shiota, "When I dream... I feel the dream as reality. I can't distinguish between dream and reality. When I wake up, I have the feeling I'm still dreaming."